ABSTRACT
Motion is vital to life, and to science. In many ways it was the investigation of motion, initiated by Galileo Galilei in the late sixteenth century, and brought to a head by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth, that inaugurated the modern era of physics. Progress since that time has been so great that describing motion is regarded as a fundamental part of science rather than one of its frontiers. To the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno, motion seemed such a self-contradictory feature of the world that he and his followers became convinced that the apparent existence of motion only served to indicate the fundamental unreliability of our senses. For Zeno the description of motion was not only a fundamental problem, it was, perhaps, the fundamental problem. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
